David Read's

Commentary on Creation/Evolution Headlines

December 7, 2007

Please note the new page (bottom button on the left):  A very good recipe for "Special K Loaf"

Here's an article in the Times (of London) about a dinosaur bone bed discovered in Spain during the construction of rail line between Madrid and Valencia. 

Mr Ortega said the find should help shed light on the extinction of the dinosaurs in Europe and whether they also died out as a result of the huge meteorite that struck modern-day Mexico.

No, it didn't strike modern-day Mexico, it struck what is now Mexico.  That is the kind of semi-literacy I expect from an American newspaper, not from the mother country.

Anyway, the site is a huge dinosaur graveyard full of enormous hebivorous Titanosaurs:

The different species found include three, perhaps four, different types of Titanosaurus – huge, long-necked creatures that munched on plants and walked on four thick legs. More than 100 individual Titanosaurus have been found at the site, some of them with thick armour plating on their backs, a feature not previously seen in Europe.

If largely complete skeletons of Titanosaurus are found, it should shed much light on these creatures, which currently are known only from fragments such as cervical vertebrae. 

Meanwhile, back in the States, ATV riders in Utah noticed that they were riding over a large concentration of dinosaur tracks.  Finally, some hunters managed to dislodge a Bureau of Land Management bureaucrat from his desk and direct him to the site (probably at gunpoint):

The site, five miles southwest of Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park on Bureau of Land Management property, was reported to a BLM worker by hunters about three weeks ago.  Recognizing the significance of the prehistoric prints - thousands of them - officials quickly closed a football-field-sized area to ATVs.  "Some people knew the tracks were out there, but we didn't," BLM spokesman Larry Crutchfield said.

Some of the tracks belonged to large herbivores:

And those fossilized footprints - along with stone tracks of five other dino species, including three-toed crocodiles and a 35-foot-long, four-toed plant-munching prosauropod - have been discovered in a popular off-road-riding area in Kane County.

The location is a desert today, and dino track specialist Martin Lockley believes it was desert when the dinosaurs left the tracks:

One of the site's most tantalizing features is a series of about 100 layers that allow the geologic record to be read like pages in a book.  "It is like a window we can look through at a time 190 million years ago, see its ecosystem," said Martin Lockley, who heads the Dinosaur Tracks Museum at the University of Colorado at Denver.  Lockley visited the site this week to inventory the area for a report to the BLM.  He said the creatures made the thousands of footprints at a time when the region was a desert as harsh as the Sahara - with intermittent deluges that left pools for crocodiles and spawned vegetation for plant-eating beasts.  "You rarely find herbivores in a desert," Lockley said.

Anyone want to volunteer to do the math on how many pounds of vegetation a "35-foot-long, four-toed plant-munching prosauropod" would need to munch every day to sustain itself?  

The idea that this area was desert strikes me as preposterous.  Ever try to leave distinctive tracks on a sand dune?  It doesn't work.  To leave distinctive, recognizable tracks you need two things (1) sand and (2) water.  In other words, you need wet sand.  And how do they get preserved?  They are preserved because another layer of sediment was dumped on top of them before they could weather away.  And at this site, that happened 100 times.  Wet sand, trackmaking, tracks covered by sediment, more wet sand, more trackmaking, more sediment dumped on top of that, etc., etc., 100 times over.

What happened at this site is explained in my book as follows:

December 6, 2007

The amazing success of AIG's creation museum has unmasked the intolerance of the militant left like nothing I have ever seen.  I know I've blogged on this several times (3/27/07, 3/29/07, 7/25/07), but the articles just keep rolling in. 

In this article in the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal, one James K. Wilmot, who taught school in America but moved to England (where, one assumes, he will be much happier) opines that the creation museum "is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country". 

If adults want to believe in a 6,000-year-old Earth, that dinosaurs and humans lived together in harmony (all dinosaurs were vegetarians, you see) and that Noah saved all of the Earth's animal species by placing them on his ark, then they have the right to do so. What I object to is that thousands of children, particularly the growing number of Christian home-schooled children in this country, are visiting the museum in droves, much to the delight of the museum's founder, Ken Hamm.

So, children should be prevented from visiting the creation museum?  If you believe that, then you also believe that parents who home-school their children should be forced to teach them Darwinism.  Wilmot not only believes that, he actually says it in a published article:

One other change needs to occur to keep home-schooled children from being misled by creationists. The Kentucky home-school statutes are terribly vague. In fact, science education is not even mentioned in the regulations. If a student is never taught the scientific method and how science is the best method we humans have of collecting unbiased, factual information about the natural world, and instead taught that blind obedience to an ancient text is all that is needed to lead a happy, meaningful life, how can this child ever expect to make informed, science-based decisions as an adult? These statues should be changed so that science education, real science education, is a requirement in all home schools.

Well, he doesn't explicitly say it, but he strongly implies it.  Wilmott rails on and on about the "close-minded, anti-knowledge fundamentalists":

We do not need citizens who are closed-minded, anti-knowledge fundamentalists who want to see the world move closer to the Biblical prophecies of an Armageddon. (AIG also believes in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation.) Unfortunately, the creation museum in Northern Kentucky has been very successful at encouraging their non-thinking, anti-reasoning philosophy, especially among young, dinosaur-loving children. Inaction in this matter may come back to haunt us in the future.

He claims that I am closed-minded and anti-knowledge, but he has so little self-awareness that he can't appreciate the totalitarianism of his position. 

Let's play a game of shoe-on-the-other-foot.  Suppose I'm a Darwinist, but I live in a country where all the schools that are supported by my tax dollars teach creationism and are forbidden by the courts to teach Darwinism.  Out of frustration at that and other issues of educational content and quality, I decide to teach my children at home, where I can teach them Darwinism without interference from the state.  I do not want to teach my child any creationism, which I consider an ancient, semitic myth, confabulated by ignorant, desert-dwelling nomads some four thousand years ago.  At considerable expense and inconvenience to myself, I am home-schooling my children, primarily so that I can teach them Darwinism.  Along comes an enraged creationist activist (who lives in another country) and demands that the authorities of my country force me to teach Creationism to my child, in my own home! 

As I wrote back on March 27, "Creationists do not force anyone to visit the creation museum in Kentucky, or to put their children in private school; rather, it is the Left that would use the state to enforce Darwinist indoctrination at gunpoint."

Strangely, Wilmott seems annoyed that the Creation Museum charges for admission, and compares it unfavorably to the Natural History Museum, a comparatively ancient institution with a two century head start on the Creation Museum:

Last month in England, I toured the Natural History Museum in London. (It's free by the way.) They too have animatronic dinosaurs. However, that's where the similarity between this "real" museum and the AIG's creation museum ends. The NHM of London has 55 million preserved animal specimens, nine million fossils, six million plant specimens and more than 500,000 rocks and minerals. They have a staff of over 300 scientists working on various projects to gain a better understanding of the Earth and the creatures that inhabit (or did inhabit) our planet. Is there not something wrong when thousands of people are flocking to Northern Kentucky and paying $20 a pop to see a Flintstones-like interpretation of pre-history, and yet anyone who lives in or visits London can see one of the world's greatest real science centers for free?

Um, no, James, the Museum of Natural History is not "free."  It may not charge admission, but it gets 80 to 90% of its funding from the British government, i.e., taxpayer dollars.  By contrast, the Creation Museum obviously does not have access to government funding (nor could it constitutionally receive such funds) so it must charge admission.  It is also worth noting that the scientist most responsible for getting the MNH, which was once merely the natural history department of the British Museum, its own separate and grand building in South Kensington, was Sir Richard Owen, who also coined the term "dinosaur."  And, by the way, Owen was not a Darwinist.  

And according to Ken Ham, there are several Ph.Ds on the staff of the Creation Museum:

They are also sometimes surprised and pleased to learn that we have several staff members who hold doctorate degrees.

"Closed-minded, anti-knowledge fundamentalists" with doctorate degrees?   

November 29, 2007

Here's a Q&A with Mary Schweitzer, the paleontologist who found dinosaur blood cells.  I have blogged more than once about this remarkable discovery (9/20/06, 4/16/07), and it is also in my book (as well as all over the internet). 

Creationists have been criticized for arguing that one would not expect to find red blood cells in 65 million year-old-fossils, but Schweitzer also thought it was extraordinary, to the point of refusing to believe what she was seeing:

Yeah, it did sort of "blow my mind." Still does. I spent about three weeks saying that I couldn't be seeing what it looked like I was seeing. I kept looking at them over and over, and I would get goosebumps. I kept thinking that there had to be some kind of mistake, and I had my technician repeat the studies over and over and over with new chunks of bone to be sure we could get the same results.

And, in my own case, I was not looking for vessels and cells in the first dinosaur we found them in, because like every other paleontologist, I did not think there could possibly be any remnant of those structures surviving for that long. The vessels and soft tissues we discovered were actually the happy accident of looking for and trying to describe something else entirely.

Indeed, her skepticism of her own discovery is extraordinary:

If, for example, I were able to isolate those round red structures in the vessel and analyze them separately, and if I were to see any signals that are consistent with heme or hemoglobin, I would be much more likely to believe they are related to the dinosaur cells and proteins. For right now, I am assuming they are not.

As for an acceptance of this work, what needs to be realized is that it is the job of my colleagues to be very skeptical. That is how we keep one another in line! Peer review is crucial to the scientific process, and the skeptical opinion of my colleagues is something I rely on very much. They are probably not as skeptical as me though. I think many of them have a "let's just wait and see" attitude that is very, very appropriate. We have a saying that goes, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Schweitzer's stubborn skepticism is born of the knowledge that her discovery simply does not fit long-ages geology, which forms the framework of all mainstream paleontology, particularly the sub-discipline of taphonomy:

I think that our fundamental understanding of the fossilization process may be somewhat in need of revamping—but only if it can be shown that this material is original to the dinosaurs and not some unknown artifact.

When the subject of creationism is explicitly raised, Schweitzer falls back on stock answers, such as the nonsense shibboleth of "testability."

Q: Many creationists claim that the Earth is much younger than the evolutionists claim. Is there any possibility that your discoveries should make experts on both sides of the argument reevaluate the methods of established dating used in the field?
Carl Baker, Billings, Montana

A: Actually, my work doesn't say anything at all about the age of the Earth. As a scientist I can only speak to the data that exist. Having reviewed a great deal of data from many different disciplines, I see no reason at all to doubt the general scientific consensus that the Earth is about five or six billion years old. We deal with testable hypotheses in science, and many of the arguments made for a young Earth are not testable, nor is there any valid data to support a young Earth that stands up to peer review or scientific scrutiny. However, the fields of geology, nuclear physics, astronomy, paleontology, genetics, and evolutionary biology all speak to an ancient Earth. Our discoveries may make people reevaluate the longevity of molecules and the presumed pathways of molecular degradation, but they do not really deal at all with the age of the Earth.

Another way of phrasing that last sentence is that science will accept the idea that soft tissues can last forever sooner than it will re-evaluate the age of the earth.  The idea that the earth is old is non-negotiable, not tentative (even though every scientific theory is theoretically tentative).

But returning to the "testability" shibboleth, here's a test of young-earth creationism:  If young-earth creationism is correct, and the Genesis Flood buried the dinosaurs only some 4,500 to 5,500 years ago, we might expect to find soft dinosaur tissue, in conditions of good preservation.  However, if the dinosaurs were buried some 65 million years ago, we would never expect to find soft dinosaur tissue under any circumstances of preservation; in fact, if we found it, we wouldn't believe our own eyes.

Now, which theory passed the test? 

November 28, 2007

Here is an interesting article about the evolution of the angiosperms, or "flowering plants." 

Doug and Pam Soltis, a UF professor of botany and curator at UF's Florida Museum of Natural History, respectively, also showed that a stunning diversification of flowering plants they are referring to as the "Big Bang" took place in the comparatively short period of less than 5 million years -- and resulted in all five major lineages of flowering plants that exist today.

"Flowering plants today comprise around 400,000 species," said Pam Soltis. "So to think that the burst that give rise to almost all of these plants occurred in less than 5 million years is pretty amazing -- especially when you consider that flowering plants as a group have been around for at least 130 million years."

"One of the reasons why it's been hard to understand evolutionary relationships among the major groups of flowering plants is because they diversified over such a short time frame," Jansen said.

The latest research clears the picture by showing that all plants fall into five major lineages that developed over the relatively short period of 5 million years, or possibly even less.

There are many of these "bursts of evolutionary activity" in the fossil record, beginning with the Cambrian explosion.  The extremely rapid radiation of the mammal-like reptiles, particularly the therapsids, which I discuss briefly in my book, is another such explosion:

And then there is the problem of the sudden appearance of many different kinds of therapsids. In a sort of Permian explosion, six suborders of therapsids, including ten infraorders, 42 families, and scores of genera, appear virtually simultaneously in the fossil record.1

 

The sudden appearance of new higher taxa, families, and even orders, . . . with all the features more or less developed, implies a very rapid evolution. . . . It is possible that this is an artifact, and that the new taxa had long histories before they appeared in the fossil record, during which they gradually acquired their characteristic features. However, in no case is such a long history known by even a single specimen . . .2

 

“The abrupt appearance of the therapsids is made all the more startling by their amazing diversity,” write Stephen and Sylvia Czerkas.3  McLoughlin describes the sudden appearance of the therapsids as “an adaptive radiation of unprecedented magnitude, quickly afflicting the Permian world with a host of weird animals . . .”4  Thus, a staggeringly large variety of therapsid reptiles suddenly appears in the fossil record, and there are no earlier therapsids from which any of them could have evolved.

 

---

1.  Camp.

2.  Kemp, T.S., Mammal-like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals, (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 327, as quoted by Camp, supra (emphasis added).

3.  Czerkas, Sylvia J. and Stephen A. Czerkas, Dinosaurs, a Global View, (Limpsfield, Surrey, Great Britain: Dragon’s World Ltd, 1990), p. 54.

4.  McLoughlin, John C., Synapsida: A New Look into the Origin of Mammals (New York: Viking Press, 1980) p. 52.

I would argue that this repeated pattern of "explosions" supports the Flood theory of the fossil record, including ecological zonation theory, better than it supports the theory of evolution, which would predict long periods of evolutionary change and gradual branching out. 

November 19, 2007

Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who first successully cloned an animal--the famous sheep "Dolly"--is abandoning cloning in favor of the new method pioneered by professor Yamanaka in Japan (See my June 6 post). 

According to an article in the Daily Telegraph,

Prof Ian Wilmut's decision to turn his back on "therapeutic cloning", just days after US researchers announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates, will send shockwaves through the scientific establishment.

Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University, believes a rival method pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic cells which can be used to grow a patient's own cells and tissues for a vast range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson's, and will be less controversial than the Dolly method, known as "nuclear transfer."

His announcement could mark the beginning of the end for therapeutic cloning, on which tens of millions of pounds have been spent worldwide over the past decade. "I decided a few weeks ago not to pursue nuclear transfer," Prof Wilmut said.

Most of his motivation is practical but he admits the Japanese approach is also "easier to accept socially."

His inspiration comes from the research by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, which suggests a way to create human embryo stem cells without the need for human eggs, which are in extremely short supply, and without the need to create and destroy human cloned embryos, which is bitterly opposed by the pro life movement.

I had a feeling, when I heard about Yamanaka's breakthrough, that it was going to solve alot of ethical problems and lead more quickly to further genetic discoveries.

UPDATE:

There is a good editorial here arguing that President Bush's position promoting stem cell research, while at the same time opposing research on new lines of human embryonic stem cells, has been vindicated by the new breakthrough.  And here is another great editorial in the Wall Street Journal, including this pithy quote:

President Bush's refusal of federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines didn't halt major stem-cell advances, any more than the prohibition against life-threatening research on human subjects, such as the infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, stopped the advance of medical treatments.

November 14, 2007

Here is a recent column by the funniest pundit writing in English today, Mark Steyn.  He muses on three seemingly disparate but closely related phenonmena: 1) radical environmentalism, 2) the decline of Christianity in the West, and 3) the concommitant rise of Islam: 

The other day, I spotted a small news item about the United Church of Canada – ie, northern Congregationalists. Between 1961 and 2001, the country’s population increased from 18 million to 31 million, but the UCC’s congregational rolls fell by 39%.

Needless to say, the Moderator – the church’s head guy – isn’t bothered. “I see the change as liberating,” the Reverend David Giuliano told The National Post, “because we don’t have to hold on to that anymore.” It’s like Wal-Mart: The sooner you lose all that mass-market aisle-clogging traffic, the sooner you can be the little boutique speciality niche business you’ve always wanted to be.

And, if the Reverend Giuliano’s feeling liberated with his 39% drop-off, the Anglican Archbishops must be cartwheeling through the naves. In the same period, the membership of the Anglican Church of Canada fell by 53%, and it’s still picking up speed. Will the last gay vicar in the remaining unsold cathedral please turn off the lights? Circa mid-century. Okay, more like 2030.

It’s one of the curious features of the age that man demands the natural environment be preserved in an artificially unchanging state while being entirely insouciant to the abandonment of large slabs of his own broader environment. Had 53% or even 39% of the Antarctic ice shelf melted away, even we naysayers might be silenced. Yet the all but complete secularization of virtually the entire western world except the United States in little more than a generation is assumed to be the merest adjustment with no possible downside, unless you’re the benighted paranoid Americans too superstitious to get with the program.

Read the whole thing.

November 13, 2007

Worth reprising, here is my post from October, '06, of Studenroth's "Evolution of the Automobile"

Here is the famous "Evolution of the Automobile" parable, a cute little tweak of evolutionary phylogenetics, or cladistics by John C. Studenroth, Ph.D.  The difficulties confronting the paleocarriologists are not unlike those confronting Darwinists in other specialties:

Proposed Criteria for Basing Phylogenies:

The following is only a small sampling of the numerous proposals in the paleocarriage literature.

A. Number of wheels: It has long been recognized that three-wheeled carriages are typically more primitive than four-wheeled carriages. For example, the earliest fossil of a steam powered carriage (Phylum Steamolophyta) was a tricycle, the Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, 1769. Likewise many early species in Gasolinolophyta, e.g., genus Benz, all species from 1885-1890. The problems with this criterion, however, are serious. (1) There are numerous two-wheeled autolocomotes extant today that are very sophisticated and evolutionarily advanced, e.g., the species Harley davidson, and numerous others, in the family Motorocyclidae. Yet it is generally assumed that the two-wheeled species must be more primitive than either three- or four-wheeled species. (2) To further complicate matters, the vast majority of the markedly primitive heterolocomotes in Kingdom Prokarriageota are four-wheeled (most of the simplest and oldest wagons)!

B. Open versus Closed Carriages: Another general assumption often seen in the literature is that an open carriage (with no roof, no or few windows, etc.) is a primitive condition, and that closed carriages represent a major phyletic advance. The problem here is that some members of Kingdom Prokarriageota, both extinct and extant, were or are closed (e.g., covered wagons, royal coaches of several cultures), and some modern carriages are open (e.g., subspecies convertibilis can be found in many if not